Donald Trump speaks with supporters at a campaign rally at Fountain Park in Fountain Hills, Arizona, on March 16, 2016. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Summer has just arrived to Europe and the streets of Paris, blockaded by striking workers and students throughout the spring, are still on fire. The tumult in France is the latest in a five-year wave of uprisings across the world — from Egypt to Istanbul — that have drawn comparisons to the global uprisings of 1968.
But it’s not just the forces of social and economic justice that are having their moment. A few hundred kilometers away in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party has been very narrowly defeated in the presidential election in these same days, demonstrating the significant resurgence of nationalism in the region. In Greece, as the state positions itself to deport tens of thousands of refugees, riot police have stormed makeshift shelters and forcefully relocated those who have fled places like Syria and Afghanistan to government-run detention centers.
And in the United Kingdom, days before a Brexit vote on the country’s status within the European Union that has garnered support from both the far right and far left, pro-refugee Member of Parliament Jo Cox was publicly murdered on June 16, by a fascist activist in the first political assassination to occur in that country in decades.
These developments, and the IMF’s recent statement calling its own neoliberal doctrine into question, summarize a much larger one: the European Union is unraveling, and the global order that my generation grew up with as a fact of life, the one whose emergence was described by Francis Fukuyama as the “end of history,” is crumbling, too.
Jolted by a long-anticipated crisis that its hastily taped-together societies may not be willing to deal with, Europe is…